The most recent city on the BarCamp Tour was BarCamp Omaha. Omaha has a blossoming tech and entrepreneur scene and was named one of the 7 cities that have caught startup fever. I got to see it first hand as there were tons of folks at BarCamp Omaha who had startups, small businesses or other tech projects they were working on.
The organizers, Dusty Davidson, Eric Downs, Matt Secoske and Megan Hunt (aka. Princess Lasertron who had just finished showing at Omaha Fashion Week.) did a fabulous job. They got a ton of sponsors for everything from snacks to the weather. The conference was held at the Nomad Lounge, a beautiful renovated factory space, with a pre-party on Friday night and a full day of sessions on Saturday.
BarCamp Omaha had tons of great sessions including:
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I’m crazy about new businesses. The passion, the excitement, the discovery involved in starting something new, figuring out what works, pursuing a passion. I’m known in the office for exuberant introductions to a favorite new customer. I carry pictures in my briefcase of my favorite old customers. Starting a new business is hard as hell (I have first hand experience), but it is a special breed of person who can weather that perfect storm. And those are the people I want to spend my professional life with.
So why, you might ask, would someone this loopey for the little guys hang out with the corporate suits? Do I want to get bought? Do I want to get financed? Do I want to get customers? Do I want to get free lunch? Yes to maybe a few of these things, but the real reason is that there are some amazing things that can be done when the industry stalwarts are working with the young innovators. And I want to be the small company in on the big conversations.
And so co-upstart Sunir Shah from FreshBooks.com and I are proposing a SXSW Conference panel presentation titled “Dancing with Giants: How Start-Ups Do Deals with Industry Titans”. Our plan (and you can support it by voting for our session) is to spend our hour talking with 3 of the mega giants in our industry; Google, Intuit and American Express about how small and big businesses can work together to build small business greatness.
There can be many pitfalls in doing “game-changing” deals with large corporations; they can disrupt your product plan, delay development efforts, cost money in legal fees, then change directions, abandon your project or launch a competing product. Not to mention your 3 person development team working with a 50 person “rule by committee” scenario on the other side. Not ideal.
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Tags: batchblue, small business, small business web, start-up, sxsw12, SXSWi
As you may know, BatchBlue is one of the sponsors of the BarCampTour which is a ten-city tour of BarCamps for 2011. The latest and 5th stop on the tour was at BarCampNola 4 in New Orleans.
The conference was held at Launch Pad which is a beautiful co-working space located in a building that is also home to a number of tech companies. Organizers Matt Tritico and Nicky Mast did an amazing job. The conference was very well organized and I enjoyed participating in the the BarCampNola tradition of introducing yourself with three words. Every detail was well thought out including the cute t-shirts and the delicious lunch.
Attendees added their session proposals to the Big Board, and then we were off! There were so many interesting sessions it was hard to choose one for each time-slot. Some of the sessions I attended were:
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We’re just getting back from our second stop on the BarCamp Tour: the 6th annual MinneBar held at the Best Buy headquarters in Minneapolis. MinneBar is the largest BarCamp in the country, with about 1,000 people attending this year’s event.
The conference itself was great; lots of interesting sessions, fantastically smart and engaged attendees, and the Best Buy headquarters blew me away with how eco-friendly and employee-focused it was by design. Fellow BarCamp Tour busser and Shopify‘s Tech Ambassador Joey DeVilla wrote up a great post about the day’s event over on his blog Global Nerdy, and Stephanie Bullis from Grasshopper posted on 5 Ways to Make Your BarCamp the Next Minnebar.
The thing that impressed me the most from a sponsor’s perspective, though, was how the event organizers Ben Edwards, Luke Francl and Adrienne Pierce really took the time to make us feel welcomed, included and appreciated.
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Tags: batchblue, Community, marketing, sponsorship
BatchBlue made the front page of the Providence Journal recently, an event made even more exciting by the fact that we’re playing cornhole in the accompanying picture (sadly, you can’t see it on the online edition. But look! Here are our custom cornhole bags currently touring the country as part of the BarCamp Tour). The story focuses on our humble beginnings as a few frustrated parents trying to balance work life with some brand new babies. If you’ve ever wondered just how many babies, you can read all about it here. Thanks to our friends at the Projo for the nice write-up.
In other local news, our president Pamela was awarded a Business Women’s Award for the Technical Services category award by the Providence Business News. Pamela and her fellow winners will be honored at a luncheon from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. on May 5 at the Providence Marriott Downtown. Pamela also weighed in a recent eCRM article entitled Ten Common CRM Mistakes and How to Avoid Them – you should check it out if you’re looking for great tips on using a CRM. Congrads to Pam!
You can always check out our latest BatchBlue press over on our press page. And over on the Small Business Web page, you’ll find some articles about what’s happening in Small Business Web news.
But enough about us. It’s time to get back to helping customers, planning our upcoming events and finding cool new stuff to do. Have a great week, everyone!
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